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WINEMAKER INTERVIEW 134 WINES&VINES January 2018 contrast, fermenting our Mt. Harlan wines with a majority of whole clusters provides complexity, structure and makes the wines much more ageable. This is something people love. They know they can age our Mt. Harlan wines for 20-plus years, and they will not go over the hill. Q As winery equipment has improved, has that changed your practices in the winery? Jensen: In our third year, I designed a manual punchdown tool made for me by an inventor in San Francisco. It was like a stainless-steel pogo stick with a hinged plate on the bottom, and one or two people would get on it and jump up and down to push the fermenting cap down to the bottom of the tank. Then Dick Graff of Chalone got an engineer in San Fran- cisco to design a greatly improved pneumatic and hydraulic version, and now everyone uses this technology. It is a great labor-saving tool that works really well. In 2012, we did get a new P & L Special- ties sorting table with a belt that feeds our destemmer, and it has resulted in a big in- crease in quality. Almost all of the people who do our sorting are full-time people, and they do a fantastic job, but the table makes things even better. Q For a time, you were using glass clo- sures on some of your wines. Why did you discontinue them? Jensen: We discontinued them because in 2010, we had a batch of bottles where the neck was slightly too large, and they leaked. It was a mess. That was the end of glass clo- sures at Calera. A resident of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Laurie Daniel has been a journalist for more than 35 years. She has been writing about wine for publications for more than 21 years and has been a Wines & Vines contributor since 2006. Jensen believes planting downhill from a limstone deposit can elevate wines from good to great.